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COMMUNICATING WITH CONSTITUENTS:PROVEN HIGH-ROI TECHNOLOGY FOR GOVERNMENT AGENCIES

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Executive Summary .......... 1

Communicating with Constituents .......... 2

Communicating with Constituents: Knowledge Bases in Action .......... 3

Communicating with Constituents: Managing Interactions .......... 5

Communicating with Constituents: Installing vs. Hosting .......... 6

Communicating with Constituents: Better Government .......... 7

Government Agencies in Action .......... 8

New York Department of Motor Vehicles .......... 8

Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council .......... 9

About RightNow Technologies .......... 10

COMMUNICATING WITH CONSTITUENTS:Proven High-ROI Technology for Government Agencies

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

To be successful, any government technology initiative must possess two key attributes. First, it must have well-defined objectives. Web-enablement, for example, should never become an end in itself. Instead, technologies (including the web) should be applied to a primary agency challenge or “pain point.” By targeting such a challenge, the agency ensures that its rewards will be well worth its investments.

Second, an initiative must be technically viable. It must use proven technologies that can be reliably applied to the specific challenges being targeted. Otherwise, there is a high risk of failure and waste.

Government agencies have reaped particularly high returns from technologies that improve communications with constituents. All agencies communicate with constituencies. These constituencies include individual citizens, businesses, other agencies, and even their own internal staffs. People have questions, and agencies have to give them answers.

People seek answers via several channels: the web, email, phone, snail mail, chat, and brick-and-mortar offices. Agencies must therefore be able to provide accurate, up-to-date information regardless of which channel someone happens to use at any given time. Agencies must also closely monitor communications across all channels in order to keep response times down, pinpoint any process bottlenecks, and better understand their constituencies’ top problems and concerns. And they have to do all this within the tight constraints of their existing budgets and staffing.

Agencies at the federal, state and local level have found that they can significantly improve the quality and efficiency of their communications by using technologies similar to those being used in the private sector for customer service. This proven customer service technology provides:

· A dynamic knowledge base that makes accurate, up-to-date information available to people across all communication channels, and

· An easy-to-use system for tracking, reporting on and analyzing interactions with constituents across all communication channels.

With a multi-channel knowledge base and multi-channel interaction management, agencies can communicate more effectively, support more services, and handle growing constituencies—without having to increase agency headcount. In fact, with the right technology, many agencies have found that they can improve communications while actually reducing the number of staff members assigned to phone and email tasks.

This white paper describes this technology and its benefits. It also includes real-world examples of agencies that have seen substantial improvements in the quality and efficiency of communications with their constituents.

..........

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COMMUNICATING WITH CONSTITUENTS

Communication is a big part of any agency’s job. Constituents are constantly asking questions, and agencies constantly have to answer them. People want to know if they’re entitled to benefits. They need to get the right forms and fill them out properly. Sometimes they even need to know if they’re dealing with the right agency!

Agencies handle communications with constituents in different ways. Often, phone calls and emails are answered by staff members who have other responsibilities as well. Some larger agencies have created dedicated contact centers to service and support their constituencies. In many cases, the people who answer phone calls are an entirely different group from those who develop content for the agency website. In others, the same people handle phone calls, web content, and email.

But regardless of which category an agency falls into, communication is very costly. Agencies with true call centers find them expensive to maintain. Call centers require a lot of expensive infrastructure and considerable staffing. As call volume rises, so do call center costs and call wait-times. Call center staffs must also be trained to answer calls accurately, and must constantly be kept up-to-date on changes in agency policies. If they don’t have the right information, constituents get wrong answers and more problems arise.

For agencies without such call centers, things can get even worse. Incoming calls can divert agency personnel from their primary jobs. Employees soon become overloaded—creating communication backlogs and dissatisfied constituents.

To make matters worse, people often call with simple, repetitive questions. These questions consume the time and energy of agency staff who should really be dealing with issues that truly warrant their personal attention.

As internet use has increased, agencies face the added challenge of coping with growing email volume. Email also requires personal attention from agency employees. But email interactions don’t take place in real time as phone calls do. So email messages often pile up in mailboxes—waiting days or even weeks for a reply. Many agencies are not able to track the status of these messages, so constituents may wait indefinitely for an answer.

The web is another important communication channel for any agency. The good thing about the web is that there is no incremental cost to the agency when a constituent uses it to find an answer to a question. Unfortunately, many agencies fail to use the web effectively as a communication channel. Constituents may have difficulty finding the specific piece of information they’re looking for on an agency’s site. Or that information may not even be there at all. So constituents stop using the web and make use of more costly phone and email channels.

In addition to the separate challenges each of these communication channels pose to government agencies, these three channels—phone, email and web—also pose a collective challenge. That’s because many constituents use all three channels as they interact with the agency. After an extended email exchange, for example, a constituent may call the agency to get clarification about some issue. If the agency staff member taking that call has no

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knowledge of the previous email exchange, that call probably won’t go as well as it could. Agencies therefore need a way to effectively “blend” communication across all channels.

Finally, aside from the actual mechanics of the communication channels themselves, agencies face the challenge of ensuring that staff who answer calls and emails know what they’re talking about. No agency can afford to give incorrect or inadequate answers to constituents. They must therefore empower their people with ready access to the accurate, up-to-date agency knowledge. This is especially true for agencies that are losing experienced staff members and having to replace them with less knowledgeable ones.

The communication challenges that agencies face are therefore two-fold:

The Knowledge Management ChallengeAccurate, up-to-date answers must be maintained and made easily available to both external constituents and internal staff. These answers must be available across all communication channels. And they must be easy to revise and update as required by changing agency policies and changing constituency needs.

The Interaction Management ChallengeAgency staff members need to be able to handle questions quickly and easily across all communication channels. Agency managers, for their part, need to be able to track these interactions to ensure that answers are being given on a timely basis and that specific types of issues aren’t “clogging up the works.”

By addressing these twin issues, agencies can answer constituents’ questions quickly and accurately. They can also handle these communications with great efficiency—reducing operational costs even as the range of services and/or the size of the constituencies they are required to support grow over time. Every agency employee can become more productive, and the quality of service provided by the agency as a whole can be substantially enhanced.

COMMUNICATING WITH CONSTITUENTS: KNOWLEDGE BASES IN ACTION

So how can government agencies effectively manage their institutional knowledge and make that knowledge easily available to both constituents and agency staff?

Today’s knowledge base management technology provides the answer. This proven technology fulfills government agencies’ three primary knowledge management objectives:

· Providing a single repository for all relevant knowledge and making it easy to find specific knowledge items as needed

· Allowing knowledge to be continuously updated and driven by the actual, changing needs of constituents

· Making the knowledge base available across all channels to ensure consistent answers

By fulfilling these three requirements, an effective knowledge base will significantly improve the speed with which constituents get their answers and the cost-efficiency with which the agency delivers them.

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Easy-to-Find KnowledgeAn effective knowledge base works something like the web in miniature. All the information that an agency needs to provide (policies, procedures, contact information, etc.) resides in this knowledge base. When constituents come to the agency’s website seeking some particular piece of information, they can search for it in much the same way as they would on a web search engine—by entering one or more search terms. However, because the knowledge base is a “closed universe” of information, these searches can be much faster and more effective than the typical web-wide search. In fact, using a variety of heuristic techniques, knowledge base searches can be continually refined so that searches become increasingly precise and effective.

Another technique that can make knowledge searches faster and more effective is content ranking. Typically, constituents’ questions revolve around a relatively small number of top issues. So, while a knowledge base may contain thousands of answers, an overwhelming majority of constituents will want to view the same dozen or so pieces of information—such as a mailing address or an eligibility requirement. An intelligent knowledge base will track which pieces of information are most commonly requested and place those on a sort of “Top Ten” list. This Top Ten should be the first thing constituents see when they come to the site looking for answers. That way, a very significant percentage of them will find what they need on their first mouse-click.

There are a variety of other techniques that can be used to make it easy to find specific answers in even the largest knowledge base. And the knowledge base itself can be extended to include information that already exists on the website or in other electronic documents. The key overall benefit, however, is that both constituents and agency staff can quickly zero in on the single piece of information they need at any given moment.

Relevant, Constituent-Driven ContentAnother major challenge that agencies face is ensuring that the content they make available to constituents is relevant to their needs. An agency’s subject-matter experts may do their best to figure out what constituents will need to know, but in the end, they can only make educated guesses. In fact, the only way to be sure that knowledge base content is relevant to constituent needs is to have that content driven by the actual questions constituents ask every day.

Here’s how this principle works in the real world. A constituent asks a question that is not already covered in the knowledge base. The agency staff member responding to the constituent notes this “gap” and, in the process of answering the constituent’s question, actually creates a new potential answer for the knowledge base. That answer is reviewed by the knowledge base administrator, revised or edited as appropriate, and added to the knowledge base. Thus, the next time any constituent has the same question, the answer will already be in place on the web, and they can access that answer without generating a phone call or email that someone within the agency has to handle personally.

Note that, with this approach, the creation of knowledge base content is not a separate, time-consuming task. Instead, content is developed as an intrinsic part of the constituent service process. Thus, in addition to ensuring the relevancy and completeness of the knowledge base, this approach eliminates a lot of work for agency employees.

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Leverage Knowledge Across All Channels It’s intuitively obvious that the same knowledge base should be used across all communication channels. Yet surprisingly few organizations do so. Many agencies provide their staff with hard-copy reference binders, while using a totally different process to create and publish their web content. The result is tremendous duplication of effort—and sometimes even conflicting information.

Instead, it is much more logical to use a common electronic knowledge base for use on the web and by agency staff. Usually, some portion of the knowledge base content that is available to internal staff will not be exposed to constituents. However, the “superset” of information in the knowledge base will be the same. This way, consistent answers are given regardless of the particular channel used. Plus, information only has to be published once to be available everywhere.

There are other ways to leverage this commonality of information. For example, instead of giving constituents a regular email address to send their questions to, they can be provided with a webform on the site. The fields included in the form will ensure that constituents fill out all the information needed to answer their question properly on the first try. In addition, even before the email message is sent to the contact center, it can be “scanned” for keywords. Based on those keywords, existing knowledge base answers can be offered to the constituent. If one of those items proves to be the answer the constituent was looking for, the need to reply manually to the email is eliminated altogether. This technique has proven to be very effective in reducing email workloads and speeding the delivery of answers to constituents.

COMMUNICATING WITH CONSTITUENTS: MANAGING INTERACTIONS

In addition to excelling at knowledge management, successful agencies must also be able to effectively manage their interactions with constituents. Staff members, for example, need a variety of capabilities in order to be productive and effective. As noted earlier, access to relevant agency information is essential. However, staffers also need incident-specific information in order to resolve issues quickly and appropriately. In particular, they need to see if the constituent they are helping has already contacted the agency about the issue at hand and, if so, what transpired during those earlier interactions. In some cases, they may require access to specific information about the constituent’s account or previous service history. Regardless of what type of information they are provided with, that information should be available when handling both phone calls and email responses.

Agency managers have their own special needs as well, since they need to ensure both staff productivity and overall service quality. Queue management is particularly important, since it allows managers to track response times and take corrective action if those response times exceed pre-established limits. Ideally, phone and email queues should be managed from the same interface, so the manager can reallocate resources to whichever channel needs them.

In addition to monitoring real-time incident and queue status, managers need a variety of historical reports in order to proactively address process bottlenecks and make necessary improvements. These reports include response-time trends, individual employee productivity, and query volume patterns.

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Successful managers also track a variety of knowledge base statistics. For example, it’s important to monitor the keywords that constituents are using for their knowledge base searches. Often, constituents use unexpected terms in their hunt for answers. By discovering these search terms, managers can make better decisions about the language to use in the knowledge base. It’s also a good idea to track the number of “suggested answers” being returned for each keyword. Too many answers only serve to confuse constituents. If no answers are being returned, on the other hand, then the constituent obviously isn’t being helped. Both of these situations can be easily remedied if the manager has the necessary information.

Explicit FeedbackOne great way to monitor and improve service quality is to explicitly ask constituents what they think. This can be done using one-click surveys sent to constituents after an incident is resolved. Constituents can be asked to rank the agency’s performance on a numeric scale. These rankings can be used in three ways. First, they can be used to track overall trends in constituent satisfaction. As improvements are made in communications processes, these scores can be used to measure changes in constituent perception and thereby validate investments made in service technologies. Second, they can be used to pinpoint specific problems in service delivery. If incidents handled by a particular agent get ratings below the norm, corrective action is obviously necessary. Third, surveys can be used to discover and address specific constituent grievances. Very low scores accompanied by strong comments may warrant the personal attention of an agency manager. Such attention can lead to a successful “turnaround,” where an especially dissatisfied constituent is transformed into an especially pleased one because of the agency’s quick, personal response to the problem.

COMMUNICATING WITH CONSTITUENTS: INSTALLING VS. HOSTING

Knowledge and communication management technologies are clearly enabling agencies to score big wins in terms of service quality and cost-efficiency. However, one more question must be asked before moving ahead with such initiatives: Is it better to acquire, install, and manage those technologies internally, or source them as hosted services?

Increasingly, the evidence is pointing towards the advantages of hosting. Agencies that deploy new technologies internally have to bear significant cost and risk. Their costs include expensive software and database licenses, the acquisition and installation of server hardware and storage, and intensive ongoing systems administration. Risks include project delays, faulty installation, and periodic downtime. In many cases, the agency’s internal IT organization is already stretched to the limit and can therefore only provide limited support to the new technology implementation.

With hosting, all these issues are eliminated. Knowledge base content and enabling applications reside on hardware located at a hosting facility that is fully managed by the hosting provider. Users—whether they’re constituents, agency staff, or managers—access content and applications using their desktop browsers. There’s no hardware or software to install or manage. Everything is managed by the hoster.

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Because the hoster’s technical staff specializes in managing the hoster’s communication technologies, they can typically deliver superior uptime than can an internal agency IT staff, which must juggle multiple responsibilities. Economies of scale also enable the hoster to provision more redundancy into the infrastructure that supports the application than an individual agency can.

Key benefits of hosting therefore include:

· Elimination of upfront costs, such as hardware acquisition and software licenses

· Elimination of ongoing systems and software management costs

· Rapid deployment and faster time-to-benefit

· Greater application reliability

· Greater long-term scalability

· No hidden administrative and/or support costs

There are many other advantages that come with a web-based hosted application as well. System functionality can easily be provided to other sites, outside contractors and/or telecommuters as required. In fact, if the agency moves, it doesn’t have to worry about re-locating servers and other hardware. Users can simply access the system from their browsers wherever they are.

These benefits have motivated many government agencies to choose the hosting route for their contact center deployments. By doing so, these agencies have dramatically increased their near-term project ROI while ensuring the long-term cost-efficiency of their service operations.

COMMUNICATING WITH CONSTITUENTS: BETTER GOVERNMENT

Ultimately, the purpose of any agency’s technology implementation is to improve government itself. That means making the government more responsive to the needs of its constituencies within existing resource constraints.

For government agencies of all kinds, technology-enablement of communication with constituents has proven to be a winning strategy for improving services while controlling costs. The primary benefits realized by these agencies through the use of today’s knowledge management and communication management technologies include:

Fast, Accurate Answers to Constituent’s QuestionsGetting the right answer from a government agency right away can make a big difference to an individual or a business. By ensuring its ability to quickly deliver those answers, an agency significantly improves the quality of the services it provides.

Reduced Operational CostsGovernment agencies have been able to move a larger percentage of constituent interactions away from expensive phone and email channels to the web. In doing so, they reduce their costs substantially.

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Incresed Service Capabilities With Exiting HeadcountFor many agencies, the challenge is not to reduce costs as much as it is to support more constituents and/or more constituent services without increasing staff headcount. Appropriate technologies enable agencies to achieve this critical goal by moving high volumes of routine queries to the web, thereby allowing agency staff to devote their time and energy to issues that truly warrant their personal attention.

Consistent Answers Across All ChannelsWhen agencies don’t provide consistent answers to questions, they can confuse constituents and even expose themselves to legal liability. Effective knowledge base management eliminates such exposure and ensures that identical inquiries receive identical answers.

Improved Long-Term Knowledge RetentionAgencies that don’t employ some sort of knowledge management strategy can see critical institutional knowledge leave when their most experienced employees retire. The technologies described in this paper ensure that such knowledge is captured, retained, and effectively used by all employees.

Improved Inter-Agency CooperationWhen agency knowledge is put into useful electronic formats, it can more easily be shared and made available to other related agencies. This can keep constituents from feeling that they’re “getting the run-around” and help allied agencies work more closely together.

A Better Worklife for Agency PersonnelNo one likes to spend their time answering the same questions over and over. No one feels successful if, despite countless hours of hard work, there’s still a huge backlog of unresolved questions at the end of the day. No one wants to deal with constituents who are already frustrated because they’ve been waiting hours or days for the help they need. By transforming the way agencies communicate with their constituencies, new communication and knowledge management technologies also transform the agency itself—making it a far more rewarding and enjoyable place to work.

The bottom line is that government agencies must improve and streamline their communication with constituents in order to meet service-level objectives within increasingly tight budget constraints. Service technologies have already proven themselves to be extraordinarily effective in addressing this growing challenge. For agency managers, the automation of constituent communications is a high-ROI, low-risk technology decision that can have significant positive impact on agency performance in the near and long term.

GOVERNMENT AGENCIES IN ACTION

NEW YORK DEPARTMENT OF MOTOR VEHICLESWith more than 12 online transactions available today—including ordering custom plates, replacing drivers license and car registrations and renewing vehicle registrations—the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles’ “Internet Office” averages 19,000 visitors a day. DMV internet customer relations manager George Filieau set a modest goal for his constituent-communication initiative. If

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the agency could increase the percentage of customers who got answers instantly online by 50 percent and reduce the volume of emails being generated from the DMV website by 30 percent, the initiative would be worthwhile. The results would be faster answers for constituents, reduced workloads for service reps, and the elimination of the agency’s backlog of customer queries.

What happened surpassed Filieau’s wildest dreams. In the first week of deployment, 94 percent of customers were finding their answers online, and email volume dropped 33.5 percent. With refinements, the DMV soon experienced an additional 18 percent reduction in email volume. All told, the DMV estimates that 97 percent of the people who use its website now locate their answers right then and there. The agency has also reduced the volume of email that customer service reps answer manually by an astounding 88 percent.

“This is the kind of ‘help yourself ’ service we wanted for our web customers, and we’re very pleased with the eye-opening results,” says Commissioner Raymond P. Martinez said. “We’ve found that the more you help your customers, the more you help yourself.”

ROTHERHAM METROPOLITAN BOROUGH COUNCIL The Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council in Yorkshire, England was receiving around 215,000 calls a month, which got routed through the switchboard to specialist staff. Highly trained employees were spending a lot of time answering very routine questions. The situation wasn’t satisfactory for the public either, since constituents often bounced from one Council staffer to another to get answers to their questions. There was also no way for people to get answers to their questions outside of working hours.

The Council found a hosted contact center solution that could be integrated easily into its existing telephone system. So now, when someone telephones the council or walks into one of its offices, any staff member can access the knowledge base and answer their questions right away. Callers and visitors are now rarely kept waiting or transferred from department to department. If a question can’t be resolved using the system, the incident is logged and the appropriate answer is added to the knowledge base—ensuring that if the question is ever asked again, the answer will be available.

“Everyone from our staff to the chief executive is behind the changes we are making. We have committed to an agenda of major change,” says Jonathan Prew, the Council’s business and corporate IS manager. “The technology we are implementing really helps us to help the people of Rotherham.”

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